Boston Globe calls for freeze on Clinton Foundation donations

The Clinton Foundation should stop accepting donations, and if Hillary Clinton is elected president, it should be shut down, The Boston Globe editorial board wrote Tuesday.

Although The Globe praised the foundation’s work over the past 15 years, it said the organization is a political distraction and a conflict of interest.

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“But as long as either of the Clintons are in public office, or actively seeking it, they should not operate a charity, too,” the editorial board wrote. “The Clintons themselves seem to realize that; ‘There’ll clearly be some changes in what the Clinton Foundation does and how we do it,’ Bill Clinton said in June; ‘And we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.’ Why wait? The Clintons should move now to end donations to the foundation, and make plans to shut it down in November. Even if they’ve done nothing illegal, the foundation will always look too much like a conflict of interest for comfort.”

The Clinton Foundation has repeatedly come under fire from Republicans for accepting donations from overseas countries that have shaky human rights records, such as Saudi Arabia.

Questions have also been raised about the extent Hillary Clinton was involved in the foundation while she was secretary of state. For example, The New York Times reported that emails from the State Department during her tenure show an executive at the Clinton Foundation in 2009 trying to put a donor in contact with the U.S. ambassador to Lebanon because of the donor's interests in the country. Other emails show foundation officials asking Clinton to help a foundation associate get a job.